Money is in the Keywords

If you are anything like me, when the person developing your website starts talking about SEO and Tags you probably are thinking something along the lines of “I will just smile, nod and pretend I know WTF they are on about, they obviously know what they are talking about”.

Over the last few months I have had numerous offers from proclaimed “SEO BlackBelts” offering to sit down with me and go through the SEO for this website. Frustrated with firstly not exactly understanding what SEO meant and secondly with being annoyed at being constantly approached I did sit down and now – I’m a converted man.

If you are not technical minded, then you need to keep reading this post as I am going to give you a few key tips on what search engine optimisation is and how to identify things on your browser, that before this post you probably took no notice of – I know I didn’t.

See that Blue bar at the top of your page? – That has your keywords, this is what google uses to find your page. That means if you are an online store that sells t-shirts and the name of your store is something obscure like Rosco’s Rags and you don’t have the word T-Shirt in your title on that blue bar – you will never make it to number 1 on google. And why do I need to be number 1 on google? Because only 6% of people ever go past the first page of search results – If you are not there – you are losing customers.

So what exactly are people searching for? You can see this via the Google Keyword Research Tool. For instance when I was researching for the Shoe String Launch Blog, I was going to have small business startup in my blue bar, but when I looked closely there are only 36 monthly searches in Australia for that specific phrase compared to 246,000 for the word startup – How many do you think i want to be getting in front of ?

Look at your website, look at the blue bar – Now go and type those words into the free Google keyword reaserch tool. How many people are looking for you each month here in Australia? Is it time to change your keywords?